The designers who kept all her secrets
Afew months before the big wedding, 19-year-old Diana was taken by her mother, frances Shand Kydd, to the west London showroom of Scottish-born milliner John Boyd. veteran of the Chelsea design establishment, Boyd had been making hats for Princess Anne since she was 17, and Margaret Thatcher since she became Prime Minister in 1979. ‘I knew Diana’s grandmother,’ he tells me now, aged 91. ‘ And I met her mother every day on the 173 bus.
‘ That day, Diana came in wearing knickerbockers, looking like a principal boy on the stage. She was quite shy, but it quickly became clear she wasn’t interested in plush showrooms; she wanted to see the workroom upstairs and meet the girls there.
‘They got chatting and she told them she’d come because there was a marriage in view, though she didn’t say it was hers.
‘Then she spotted a tricorne hat — a new shape for us — which was going to be in the latest collection, and she said: “Oh, I do like that, I think I want that for my going away hat.” And that was when we realised it was
her wedding she was talking about.’ The hat was plucked from the collection, and the shape reserved for Diana. Boyd made another in the same peach-coloured silk as the Bellville Sassoon going away outfit, and topped it with ostrich feathers — a reference to the Prince of wales’ three-feathered insignia — which were dyed to match the fabric.
even for Boyd, it was a career- defining commission and the hat was a big public hit. Suddenly ostrich feathers were all the rage. Indeed, Boyd’s South African supplier, whose business hitherto was built on providing huge feathers for dancing girls in Hollywood, was ‘flabbergasted’ by the boom in demand.
In those early years the Princess was almost never seen without a hat, and Boyd became one of her most trusted designers. He understood the enormity of the task she was faced with, and developed a kindly, teasing relationship with her.
‘She was very tall, and I had to avoid making her look any taller,’ he says. ‘She liked hats that fitted quite close to her head, and she liked little nets and veils too, which also became very popular.’
In fact Boyd’s pretty Diana designs — tricornes, mini-bowlers, close-fitting cocktail hats with netting and feathers — triggered a trend for small-brimmed hats. ‘from 1981 to 1983, the style was copied at every possible price level,’ wrote critic Colin McDowell.
At seven and a half, her hat size was a little bigger than average, and her hair was ‘quite springy’, so Boyd bought special wire combs from Thailand to keep the hats on her head.
‘She had a great sense of humour,’ he says. ‘I used to tease her, and say: “You’ve got a big head — let’s hope there’s a lot inside it because you’ve got a big job.”
‘I remember once, early on, we went to the
wee cafe across the road from the showroom and a woman there said to her: “You look just like that new Princess.” And she replied: “That’s funny, everybody says that . . .” ’
It’s a telling anecdote from a time, hard to imagine now, when Diana’s face was still relatively unknown — glimpsed under a heavy veil on her wedding day, but by no means iconic yet. ‘She did have a wonderful fashion sense,’ says Boyd. ‘She knew just how to wear hats and look chic. And the more people got to know her, the better an ambassador she was for British fashion.
‘In the end, she was just the best we’ve ever had. Wherever you went in the world, as soon as they heard you speak English, people would ask you all about “Lady Di”. They couldn’t get enough of her.’
As she grew into her Royal role, milliners Philip Somerville, Frederick Fox, and Graham Smith of Kangol, were drafted in, too.
The Australian hat- maker Fox was particularly influential in the mid-Eighties, when Diana began to experiment with wider brims and was seen wearing his flying saucershaped hats at Ascot.
Somerville, meanwhile, often made hats to co-ordinate with outfits by Catherine Walker, and encouraged Diana to go for bold colours, often with distinct hat bands — fuchsia and pillar box red; crimson and black. This was in marked contrast to John Boyd’s more discreet affairs. He was also behind Diana’s move into Jackie Kennedy- style pillboxes, which she wore perched on the back of her head.
Stephen Jones, much nearer to Diana’s own age — and best known for hats worn by Boy George and Madonna — came up with a series of berets. These were some of the easiest and youngest- looking solutions during her hat-wearing years.
Hats didn’t just arrive as an afterthought, of course. One of the strictest royal rules was that they had to be closely co-ordinated with clothes or coats in time-consuming fittings with designers. Diana spent so long in their studios that the couturiers and hat-makers surely came closest to understanding the pressures and anxieties she felt.
Away from the Palace, designers’ studios became places where she could play around and feel safe and semi-normal, among people she could trust and even treat as friends.
Her milliners and dress-makers never leaked to the Press, never expected to be mentioned in Palace releases, and never gossiped out of turn. Under those circumstances, they could hardly fail to pick up on her problems.
‘I think you could tell from the beginning that the girl wasn’t going to have a very happy future,’ says John Boyd, who saw how isolated and unsure she was. ‘She absolutely adored her boys when they came along, but knowing how it would end, it was very sad.’
Eventually, Diana threw off her hats as she shed her royal duties. The sleek, grown-up style she embraced in the mid-Nineties didn’t include hats or tiaras.
But to the end, and beyond, she kept the admiration of the professionals who worked with her and, in their discreet, careful and typically British way, looked out for her, too.